ISLAND is a new work that brings together the moving image practice of Sam Williams and the narrative writing of Laura Grace Ford. Together they have produced a collage of footage captured in London, Berlin and Marseille where bodies connect through remembered gestures, reaching for familiarity through sensory and temporal networks.
Drawing on cognitive mapping and the concept of the dérive, this work interrogates place by mapping the psychic contours of the city, unearthing spaces that evade the neoliberal pressure to be an entrepreneurial, self-promoting individual; in the encounter with other life-worlds you escape your own reflection, inhabit other minds.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney use the term 'hapticality' to describe the affective textures that can be accessed through others. They describe ‘modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress...the feel that no individual can stand, and no state abide.’
Ford and Williams make use of the term hapticality as an incubator of counter-strategies. Hapticality, or feeling, is applied to the way we experience cities, through and with others, others who may or may not exist in the present. Feeling becomes collective knowledge, a tacit, covert network.